The young doctor Paul Hein moves from the provinces to Berlin to make his career. There he encounters all the temptations of the big city. Will his decency and his love for his fiance survive amidst the charms of the metropolis?

And yet the wanderer sometimes pulled up, and looked with dull astonishment down the endless rows of houses. They were precisely the same buildings which he had admired on his arrival a year before, the same shops, the same streets, only he had changed, a being who only accidentally bore his name, transformed, converted, bewitched, ruined by the wand of this...

Thus sometimes a man stands and waits for a specific hour when fortune shall come, and at the same time, fortune already stands behind him, and she is a white, rosy-cheeked, wondrous girl who waits with heart pounding for the man to embrace her; and the man does not do it and thinks fortune must first come to him; and then he suddenly hears such a gentle rustling, and when he looks around, then the rosy-cheeked girl of fortune is going from him in tears, and behind him stands Mrs Sorrow with her grey cloak and grins at him and says, "Blockhead, now you can wait a long time for the little...